No you don’t.
That was a very good post, monstro.
:smack: That post about modern African countries paying reparations was supposed to be sarcasm, though I guess it didn’t go over very well. To be clear - I don’t support the idea of reparations at all. And the reason why is because it is too hard to pinpoint who exactly will pay them, and the reason why is because SO many damn people were involved in the slave trade. Africans, Europeans, Arabs, all kinds of people. So, I mean, if America is going to pay them then Africa ought to pay them too. That was my line of reasoning. I guess I didn’t make that clear enough.
From a logical standpoint, if I supported the concept of reparations, I would have to believe that they should come from everyone involved in the slave trade, including America. But I don’t support the concept at all, for reasons I stated above.
Nor was the United States so founded on that. Indeed, I’ve read through the entire constitution and such isn’t there. While your above citation is all well and good, it isn’t now, nor has it ever been the law of the land. It’s nowhere in the constitution; that is from the Declaration of Independence which isn’t a legally binding charter on the United States.
Moreover, slavery was permitted by our constitution.
And that there aren’t any current living slaves to whom Any of those people would hold a debt. For instance, the debt, if owed, is owed by people who are long since dead to people who are similarly situated.
Bring me a real live slave who suffered under the slave trade as American took part in it, and then we’ll talk.
If I had said it was the wound was 3rd degree burn, festering with infection, you’d accuse me of being melodramatic and trying to exaggerate the suffering. I describe my feelings about slavery as stinging and I’m somehow being…what? Insensitive? I don’t get your amusement. I really don’t.
What opinion do you have a problem with? My opinion that that slavery, which everyone says is an awful, horrible thing, is kind of treated like it’s a not-so-awful, not-so-horrible thing in people’s minds? Because that’s really the main point of my post, and it doesn’t seem to be that “twisted” to me. Not when I have the metal ghost of Robert E. Lee every morning and afternoon staring at me every day, telling me I’m right.
Do you tell Jews to stop talking about the Holocaust? Why is it that no one ever gives them this particular lecture, especially as it relates to Israel, but there’s plenty of scolding for the darkies who deign to mention how much slavery sucked and how no one seems to give a fuck. It’s a fucking double-standard and I’m sick of it.
Funny. I read just as much “woe is me” in my post as anyone else’s in this thread. But I guess people with reading comprehension problems are vunerable to projection.
So some random person’s sense of morality trumps legal documents now? I’m going to put that in my GD toolbox for future arguments with you.
I don’t plan to ruin my vacation arguing about reparations. If you want to see my position on the issue, do a search and you shall find.
She didn’t say it was in the Constitution, nor did she say it was the law of the land. She said it was one of the founding principles of our country - and it is. The entire purpose of the Declaration of Independence is to explain why we think we should be our own nation. It is the original description of the character we were trying to create for ourselves. The Constitution is an attempt to transform those principles into a body of law.
No. You are hands down wrong. The founding principles of our country are found within the constitution since it’s that very document which determines what is an isn’t allowable. We, as a country, agreed that slavery was okay. That is part of our legacy, and no amount of pointing to something poetic which wasn’t meant to include blacks in the first place does away with that. The statement would be better if they added in the proper caveats: white, non-indian, non-black. Or, more precisely, property owning whites.
Not all principles are legal principles.
No one is arguing that it does.
Well, it certainly would have been more accurate. But better? No, I don’t think so.
What “we”? You mean the slaves agreed that slavery was okay, so thus they never had any claim to reparations in the first place?
If all it takes is codifying oppression in law to for a government to escape later prosecution, then God help us all of us!
The slaves weren’t part of the we the constitution originally meant. So, no. That they were only counted as property at a reduced rate for determining which property owning white folks had a say in the matter I think says a lot.
I haven’t suggested that codifying such makes it okay. Or even renders one immune from prosecution. I said that because all of the people are dead, it does. Find me a real live slave who has an actual claim against a real live government official and, as I said, we’ll talk.
As it stands now, all the relevant people are quite dead. No one alive in the U.S. today is a former slave of the U.S. Government. So, it wouldn’t seem to me that they have any legal claim which is enforceable.
Ah, but we have legal precedence. In the early 1990s, we the people of the United States granted reparations to the interned Japanese and their direct descendents. We have precedence of reparations being granted to people not directly affected by governmental injustice. The problem now is determining how far away from the actual era of oppression can descendents be broken off a piece. With black people, it’s not clear since slavery wasn’t the only thing they were fighting.
If the year were 1909 instead of 2009, do you think the slave descendents would be entitled to reparations, just as the Japanese Americans were decades after their internment? Do you think they would have been at least entitled to sue companies that profited from their labor, along with all those plantation owners? I think they would, damn what the law defined black people as. The law was racist, crafted by racists. Black people didn’t have a fair shake until the passing of the civil rights act of '64. Until then, IMHO, they were still waiting for the Emancipation Proclamation to be fulfilled.
Free black people were “citizen” enough to fight in all the American wars and pay taxes for umpity-ump years, as well as help build up the country through hard labor as free people. Seems kind of arbitrary to me to say, “Hey, their brethren in chains don’t count”.
I say all of this recognizing the logistical challenges to reparations. But really, the argument that slavery was legal at the time is the weakest argument one can come up with. Slaves had no representation in government, so essentially it was the case of the majority doing whatever it wanted to the minority. That goes against the whole gist of a democratic republic.
Sounds like you’re laying the groundwork for the moral argument, after all.
Am I my great, great, great grandfather’s direct descendant?
It’s entirely academic since it isn’t 1909. But sure, let’s lay down a timeframe. How about 150 years is beyond it, and 60 isn’t. So, let’s say 3 generations is close enough, but 7 is too much.
We didn’t require citizenship to fight in our armed forces. We still don’t.
The argument isn’t that it was legal, though it was. My argument, at least, was that the declaration of independence can’t be read as being part of our law. It isn’t. Nor does it do to read into modern usage of terms, particularly when it runs completely opposite of what it originally meant.
And if you honestly think that the harms caused by slavery were suffered only by those who were slaves, then you are a very naive individual indeed.
The issue isn’t about residual harm. The topic wasn’t “does past slavery have residual affects on people who themselves weren’t slaves, or contemporaneous indictment of the morality on those who chose to act against it?”.
It’s about compensation of people who weren’t themselves slaves.
What would the burden of proof be? “My great, great, great, great grandmother was a slave. Thus, I’m burdened. Pay me.”
That’s a much better question.
Are their accurate vital statistics going back that far?
Well, your point is surely a good one, which has been otherwise mentioned here. The logistics seem to be a nightmare. Not all blacks living here now are descendants from slaves. How do we parcel them out?
I’m not a fan of reparation any more than I am of ceded all the land back to the Native Americans.
Was wrong done to these groups in the past? Sure. But what’s the solution? Evict everyone who isn’t native here out? Give all black people oodles of money?
They’d have to be able to prove somehow --I know not how-- that a.) some important ancestor of theirs was a slave, and b.) but for that, their life would be substantially better off than it is now. Some residual “pain and suffering” claim wouldn’t do. I too feel sick at the premise of slavery, murder and rape. Should I get some kind of residual pay as well?
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